So. Much. Happening.
(& so little time to blog it all!)

Wedding plans are coming along beautifully. We recently had an engagement session with our photographer, Andrew from Follan Photography, we've sent out our invitations & the RSVP's have begun trickling in already, enjoyed a kitchen tea shower thrown for me this past weekend, and are booked in for an upcoming pre-wedding counselling weekend. It's been full on, but it's great. Bring it on!

My weight has stalled spectacularly. I'm so frustrated, since trying on my wedding dress recently wasn't fun, and was more than a little snug. Imagine a fairly epic meltdown, which led to my newest decision: to try the Lite & Easy meals programme. I'm aiming for 10kg in 10 weeks. Yes, I'm that serious.

School is chugging along. There are one & a half weeks left of this term, and I am hanging out for the holidays. My class are lovely, but it's been such a stressful term - we're still in a temporary classroom, we're still getting by with hardly any resources, but we're getting there. Lately every afternoon has been filled with counselling sessions, learning support meetings, community service updates & training - I have some kids from very challenging backgrounds, as well as several with Asperger's, so I'm doing everything I can to make sure they're being looked after both socially and academically. To anyone who talks about teachers having easy days and leaving work at 3pm every day, I say PAH and also HAHAHA.

Oy, the colds. I've had two in the last eight weeks, and they're kicking my hiney. This past one has been particularly nasty - I feel mostly pretty good, with the exception of this awful chesty cough. I've had it for over a week now, and I still hock up a lung every couple of minutes. I'm hoping I'm on the tail end of it now, but I've stocked up on the multi-vitamins just in case.

I've been continuing to blog over at Weddingbee - come on over & check me out if you haven't already!

I think that's it? I am seriously exhausted, and really hoping that the next few weeks speed on by so I can have some recovery time and get ready for the next term. It's scary to think that next term is the last term I'll be called 'Miss S' - it'll be 'Mrs D' after that, which is incredibly weird. (But also, awesome.)

What's been happening in your life lately?

Yesterday, I had my hair & make-up done.

I must say, being made up is one of the most exciting aspects of wedding planning so far. I found our stylist, Jenny of Le Fabulous, a few months back & had a trial do then, but since we were having engagement pictures taken by Andrew of Follan Photography fame, I decided to splurge and have it done again.

The first time around, we went for natural and glowing coverage as well as a loose up-do. This time around? I wanted something different. Jenny gave me awesome curls & gorgeous smoky eyes - it was super dramatic. I went to pick Jase up from the station all dolled up, and he got into the car looking impressed with it, so that was a good sign!

The pre-wedding photo-shoot went well. We drove out to Galston and took pictures in this beautiful park, with a few different backdrops - and despite feeling incredibly awkward at the start, we started feeling more comfortable as time went on. The hair and make-up meant I felt okay from the shoulders up, but I'm still feeling super self conscious about my body and my weight. You see, the weight I had lost last year? Well, that is still fantastic - but I've been stuck at a huge plateau for the last few months and it hasn't budged since.

So, beautiful hair, make-up and talented photographer withstanding, I'm still terrified. I'm terrified of seeing the images and not liking what I see. I'm terrified that Jase won't like the pictures, that I won't look the way that I want to look, and worse: that I'll be too fixated on what size I look in the images to appreciate what the session was really for - time to spend with my love, enjoying each other's company in the lead-up to our wedding day. I really hope these nerves go away soon, especially before the wedding.

I'll be waiting nervously for the engagement pictures for the next few weeks, but in the meantime, here's a blurry, badly lit camera phone picture of us after the shoot. I love my little family.

I've always been a bit on the fence when it comes to whooga boots.

Having lived in London for three years, I'm no stranger to seeing them out and about on the streets - sometimes paired with interesting clothing choices in the dead of winter. As for me, well, as much as I loved the look of them, I never bought into the whole thing - particularly spending hundreds of pounds (or more, in Aussie dollars) for a pair of original Uggs. To be honest, I always thought that they were just a phase.

It seems like I was wrong though, because they're still here... & it looks like they're here to stay! Recently I was contacted by the lovely folks at Whooga Boots, to check out a pair of their newest designs.

I was sent a pair of Classic Tall Black Uggs that arrived in a gorgeous big box. To be fair while writing about my experience with the boots, I have clomped around in them for the past few days - despite it being 31 degrees in Sydney, again. (Where is this Autumn that's supposed to be here?) Suffice it to say that a few days later, I'm in love with them, and I may just be won over. While I'm still not sure about wearing them out in public, I thought the black colour would be less conspicuous than the usual chestnut colour.

... & so little spare time to say it all.

I have so many things to chat about, things to share with you & even a few amazing reviews too. School work + wedding planning + life in general is going by at crazy speeds, and I'm barely keeping afloat.

Since it's Monday already (how did that happen!?) I'll leave you with one of my favourite mellow songs, by the musical genius that is The Cure. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

How quickly I've fallen back into the routines of teaching.

Wake up, hit school early for some early morning planning or marking, teach teach teach, a playground duty & some tears, a perfectly on task morning followed by a completely insane afternoon, with a little more marking and some professional development to round out the day. Rinse and repeat.

I'm not joking when I tell you that teaching this time around is leaving me exhausted. It's been almost a month that I've had my class of Year 1/2 kidlets, but honestly - it's kicking my butt. I've been spending many a recent weekend doing planning, or staying back after school to try and catch up on assessments.

I've been dealing with incredibly anxious parents who had seen their children get settled in one class, only to be picked up and moved into a brand new class several weeks into the school year. That's not an easy thing for kids to get used to, especially considering I have several little ones with Asperger's this year. Easing their minds and making sure the kids are responding okay has been hard work, and it continues to be hard work.

All the while, I'm doing my best to fit in with the rest of the staff. They're a small school and a tight-knit team, and being the outsider is always a bit hard to deal with. Thankfully, nearly all of the staff are helpful, kind and understanding - I'm not kidding when I say I've really lucked into this position. We're still without a classroom, so I'm teaching and making do in the old library space - and I'm still playing it by ear as to how long my position will last for. If all goes well, I'll be able to stay on for the rest of the year, which would be perfect.

For now though, I teach. I also sing and dance and monitor sports. I supervise and I mediate and I study. This whole teaching thing... it's non-stop, but I remember now why I love it.

Teaching has seen me disappear from the blog-world over the last fortnight. I never expected it to take so much out of me, yet here I am - drowning in programming, paperwork & staff meetings. I've already (yes, already!) succumbed to my first cold of the year, and am suffering most miserably: apparently working outside of schools for the past few years hasn't helped my weak little immune system, it's currently taking a bit of a beating.

Last week, I blogged about some of the stress involved with casual teaching on a day to day basis. After I came home and wrote that post up, I worried about having to do that for a while - I was thankful to have a few days of work come in, but I was not looking forward to them at the same time. Funnily enough, that's when something random {and wonderful} happened.

Today I had my first day back in a classroom.

There are so many differences when it comes to teaching on a casual basis compared to working with your own classroom full of kids. It's the attitudes of the staff and the students. It's the complete lack of routines that are in place. It's the uncertainty of knowing whether you have a timetable to follow, any work left for you to plan. It's the unknown of where the classroom is, where you should park your car, where the roll is. It's the 'going in blind' approach, especially when it comes to children and their behaviours, personalities and strengths/weaknesses that you know absolutely nothing about.

It's a real eye-opener, that's for sure. You might remember that when we first moved to London, I started out doing some casual relief teaching there too. I stuck it out a few weeks, and really struggled to find a rhythm with it - which was when I started looking for other roles in education, and ended up working in an office environment for the majority of my time there instead. Well, today brought back flashbacks of coming home miserable and wondering what else was out there. It's early days yet, and I have potentially got a few more days booked in at a different school next week - but we'll see what happens there.

To break down some of today's more eventful happenings, I'm enlisting the help of some bullet points.

• Got a phone call at 7.30am, asking me to be in by 8.15am - got up, showered & dressed in ten minutes, threw together some random token food products and made sure I had a few resources in my bag ready to get going.
• Arrived at school early, only to find no parking spaces left in the lot or along the street. Parked next to a dumpster in the school car-park, went into the office to check that I could leave it there & was encouraged to drive right in to the car-park, blocking in several cars. (I wasn't too comfortable about that, but the instruction came from the Asst. Principal, so okay...)
• Found classroom - no work left, no time-table set. Decided to see about photo-copying some of my resources & told that school has a strict policy: casuals only allowed to copy 2x worksheets that have to be approved & signed off by the senior staff & only admin allowed to use the photocopier.
• Left without copies for first half of the day - so kept busy with other things, though more than a little stressful.
• Had a class of Year 1 students, which was nice. Kids okay, just kids. Quite a few personalities, though it felt comfortable teaching them - although we had a pants-wetting incident midway through the day, so that was fun.
• Administration staff not particularly friendly and/or helpful when it came to filling in my casual teaching paperwork. They treated me like a teacher fresh out of university, very patronising - and if it weren't for the kindness of a teacher that overheard our conversation & could offer some assistance, I may well have had to drive back there on another day to bring back forms that they should have provided.

And we're now back to our scheduled rambling.. with just a dash less whinging. I'm sure the job thing will work itself out eventually - and in the meantime, I'm going to keep looking, keep applying & invest in a few 'lucky' objects to push me in the right direction.

Moving completely along though, I'm doing my best to become a whiz in the kitchen. I don't cook every night - probably every other night? But I'm starting to experiment with different things a little more, and I'm like the results. Jase got a slow cooker from my parents for Christmas {such an awesome gift!... for me) & we broke it in last week - it is delightful! We had guests over for the evening yesterday and I whipped it out again - threw in my apricot chicken go-to recipe, and served it up to rave reviews. I even baked a chocolate cake in two layers! All it needed was some frosting. Plain, simple, chocolate frosting.

Unfortunately, this is my kitchen weakness. I cannot make icing. I've tried the simple icing sugar/liquid/cocoa powder ratio. I've followed recipes to make cream cheese frosting. And last night I experimented with a chocolate and sour cream (!) icing - and it STILL went runny. Apparently all of my cakes are meant to look like drowned, chocolate covered space-ship domed blobs. Lucky they still taste good.